Of all of the artists closely associated with the Impressionist movement, Camille Pissarro may be the most difficult to come to terms with. It’s not that his imagery is in any way less appealing than that of his well-loved colleagues or that his preoccupations differ substantially from theirs. Quite the contrary. Pissarro’s paintings frequently exemplify everything Impressionism aspired to. His luminous images of the Place du Théâtre-Français, for example, thronged with carriages and pedestrians, are textbook examples of everything we’ve ever learned about the Impressionists’ desire to embody the life of their times and to capture the visual characteristics of the moment—in this instance, the city of Paris, recently transformed by Haussmann’s creation of the boulevards, in the damp, hazy light of the Ile de France. With their divided color, broken stroke, and close-valued hues, Pissarro’s views of the Place du Théâtre-Français are also exemplary of the Impressionists’ aesthetic goals in formal terms, and a similar case can be made for his many paintings of rural subjects, with their tile-roofed houses, haystacks, and flowering orchards. What makes Pissarro difficult is that he was a chameleon, sometimes going off on directions of his own, sometimes responding to the innovations of his colleagues. From first to last, during a career of more than half a century—born in 1830, he began painting seriously in the early 1850s, and died in 1903—he was always ready to alter his habitual approach, always ready to test the effect of fresh motifs, new ideas, and provocative